I've been having my sanity questioned quite a lot recently. For someone who has recently discovered cycle speedway this was to be entirely expected, but my newly-discovered liking for hurtling round a shale track with no brakes is not the source of the latest challenge to my state of mind. It seems these days that simply being a cyclist is enough to have people calling for the white coat.

Reason number one is generally that cycling isn't safe. No-one questions my desire to hurtle down a bit of singletrack with nothing but a foam bonce protector between myself and and an eternity of soup. But mention going anywhere near a road in a city and a great sucking of teeth invites itself upon you. Stranger still is the fact that many people believe that cycling in the city is dangerous because the drivers are so bad, and so the solution is not to cycle, rather than sorting the drivers out. After all, one should not usurp the primacy of the motor vehicle.

The second reason for not cycling is more prosaic. Why use a bike when you have a car or public transport? Using your own energy to get somewhere? Madness... So let's look at my journey to work. At its shortest 2.5 miles which, despite all being uphill, is a 12 minute journey. My bus takes 15 minutes to get to the centre of town. From where I have to walk another 10 minutes. Oh, and the stop nearest my house is 5 minutes walk away. And that's if the traffic is fairly light.

And I get to approach something reaching fitness and not sit on a bus with assorted coughing, wheezing and mobile-phone wittering.

And compared to the car the time is pretty similar, I don't have to sit in a traffic-jam slowly oozing into trouser-busting lethargy or pay £15 to park my car outside the door for the day.

Which option seems more attractive?

Anth